The Highest Criterion: An interview with Roger Kimball
By Bernard Chapin
web posted March 17, 2003
Anthony Burgess once said that whenever he read Ulysses by
James Joyce his reaction to his own writing became "why even
bother?" I have had the same experience after reading the works
of Roger Kimball. Mr. Kimball is the Managing Editor of The
New Criterion but he is also one of the journal's most prolific
writers. Reading his work is similar to reliving the great lectures
one received in college (back when lectures weren't considered
oppressive). He writes on all cultural topics but what I have
found particularly impressive is his unforeseeable achievement of
making artistic philistines like myself interested in topics within
the art world. His work is stimulating for a variety of reasons but
primarily it is due to Kimball, despite being infinitely learned,
possessing a style that is highly readable. Amongst his lively
sentences is an uncanny ability to place his subjects within the
context of the larger issues that embody our culture.
We on the right often ask "Where are our tough guys? Why
don't we stand up to these fabricators?" Read Kimball and you
won't ask anymore. He never shirks from the duty of exposing
the poseurs of the SRL (Self-Righteous Left-interviewer's term).
Here before us, bespectacled and sporting a bowtie, is one of
our greatest enforcers. Kimball, despite his civilized appearance,
lands Tysonesque roundhouses with a greater strength and
frequency than many of our other commentators put together.
The libertine deconstructionists must lament the day he chose to
forgo an academic career as he would have been much easier to
deal with within the catty world of our universities. I'm fairly
certain that the likes of Dr. Fish and Dr. Derrida quiver in
slouched post-modern angles after being informed by an
overpaid colleague that Roger Kimball has written something
about them.
His work, The Long March, may be the finest non-fiction book
that I've ever read. In it he meticulously dissects the great
hysterics of 1960's whose moronic gallivanting across our
universities and political system has brought so much misery to
the west in the decades that followed. I hope that many of our
readers are unfamiliar with Kimball so that the joy of gazing at
the words and arguments of one of the last great knights of
western civilization will lie ahead of them. You may think that
what I am writing here is just hype but in the scrolls that follow
you will see that my introduction is nothing compared to the
glitter of the analysis below. Let us now, in this
enterstageright.com exclusive, examine the Grand Examiner
himself.
1. The first thing I'd like to ask, and I know this would be of
great interest to our readers concerns our culture. Specifically,
have conservatives lost the culture war? And, if not, what kind of
countermeasures can we undertake to make sure that there is still
something left of western civilization?
Ah, the culture war. Have conservatives lost? It seems like such
a simple question. Why is it so difficult to answer? There are a
several reasons. In the first place, when we speak of "the culture
war" we mean a conflict with multiple fronts, different and
sometimes opposing goals, and shifting allegiances. The dumbing
down of higher education is part of the culture war. So is the
institution of political correctness and the activist judicial culture
that imposes the values of a liberal elite on more and more areas
of life. So is the sexual "revolution," so-called, and the
disintegration of the family. Ditto the imperatives of
multiculturalism, with their assumption of cultural relativism and
egalitarianism. The culture war embraces what has happened to
institutions like The New York Times, which has long since
subordinated reporting the news in order to shill for all things
trendy; the culture war also embraces the degradation of popular
culture, the proletarianization of public taste, and the failure of
manners. If the culture is a plural phenomenon, so too are "the
conservatives." There are plenty of people who call themselves
conservative who worry about one aspect of the culture war but
cannot get worked up about another aspect. The liberal media is
always going on about "the vast right-wing conspiracy," etc., but
in fact conservative opinion in this country is a much more
heterogeneous thing than liberal opinion.
These two things--the multiplicity of "fronts" or battles that
constitute the culture war and the diversity of conservative
opinion--make it well nigh impossible to give a single answer to
the question "have conservatives lost the culture war?" That said,
however, I believe that any conservative who contemplates the
cultural landscape today must come away sobered if not, indeed,
depressed. There has been a steady loss of cultural capital as
one educational institution after the next--schools, colleges,
museums, and so forth--waters down its offerings in the name of
diversity or populism. There is some irony in the fact that as
educational rhetoric proliferates, the content of the education
becomes ever more anemic.
The dilution of culture is one problem: for all the marvelous
"information technology" we command, people seem to know
less and less; their cultural range of reference has contracted to
the tiny circle described by the latest headlines and characters of
this year's sitcoms and "reality" programs (i.e., virtual reality
programs). But if the content of culture has been steadily eroded
it has also become increasingly tawdry. The culture war is also a
moral war, a war over the definition of the good life. Most of the
news from that front of the culture war is discouraging.
At the same time, there are grounds for hope. For one thing, the
conservative reaction to the depredations of the culture war are
more articulate, more widespread, and more effective now than
ever before. The putatively liberal establishment--that is to say,
the establishment that calls itself liberal but is really only politically
correct--still commands most of the institutions that we entrust to
preserve and transmit culture. But there have been a series of
rude awakenings in the past decade as parents have discovered
what their children are being taught--and not taught--in schools,
as the blatant partisanship of the media has become more and
more a matter of public knowledge, as the forces of
"transgression" have transformed much of the contemporary art
world into a repellent carnival of freaks. Looking around at the
dominance of the politically correctness, it is easy to throw up
your hands and say: "It's all lost." But that would be to
underestimate the many examples of rebellion against this culture
of decadence. The home-schooling movement, the proliferation
of conservative talk shows and internet sites, the robust culture
of conservative commentary in magazines like The New
Criterion, National Review, and The Weekly Standard: these are
signs of light, adversarial ripostes to what Lionel Trilling called
the adversary culture of the intellectuals. We've got a long way to
go. But that shouldn't keep us from acknowledging the long way
we have already come.
2. In your journal The New Criterion your "Notes & Comments"
section, which is the first appearing, seems to me to be an
excellent, albeit brief, way of counter-attacking the people who
presently degrade our culture. Is this your mechanism to fight the
culture war? This month's concerns Laura Bush and the poets
and their "squeals from the nursery" (http:
//www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/mar03/notes.htm ). Again, is
this section of your journal your method for combating those
ideas you find the most offensive?
We've been running the Notes and Comments section of The
New Criterion since 1990. It has been a convenient way to
articulate a kind of editorial position on a wide range of issues.
The New Criterion is often described as a conservative
magazine. In fact, most of the magazine operates in a realm apart
from politics: we go to great lengths to deal with cultural issues
on their own terms. Our art criticism is concerned with art, our
literary essays with literature, and so on. Of course, at a moment
when culture is heavily politicized--this brings us back to the
issue of the culture wars--then staking a claim for the relative
autonomy of culture will seem to be a provocative gesture. The
Notes and Comments section is, in general, the one part of the
magazine where we engage directly with cultural politics. We
have run our share of polemical essays in the body of the
magazine, but the Notes and Comments section is where we try
to comment on and engage with topical issues. Since we are a
monthly, we are basically exempt from participating in the "news
cycle"; but we have found that our Notes and Comments section
provides an effective way to intervene in some of the more
important cultural controversies. We know from our readers that
it is one of the most eagerly read parts of the magazine, and we
have been as pleased by the irritation that it causes as by the
praise it has elicited. The writer William Dean Howells once said
that the problem for a critic is not making enemies but keeping
them. We like to think that our Notes and Comments section,
which often has a polemical edge, helps us attend to Howells's
admonition.
3. Regarding your background, I notice that a doctorate is never
mentioned after your name. Is this do to the fact that you just do
not list your educational accomplishments? Is it due to the fact
that pursuing a doctorate may have been superfluous to your
professional goals? Or, and I'm hoping that this is the answer,
that you felt that you could not stomach seven years of a heavily
politicized curriculum in the leftist enclaves known an as
American universities?
I was a graduate student at Yale and fully intended to embark on
an academic career. When I moved to New York in the mid-
1980s, I was hard at work on a dissertation on the philosophy of
art. But once I started writing regularly for magazines like The
New Criterion I found myself drifting further and further away
from the culture of academia. Long before I published Tenured
Radicals in 1990, it had become clear to me that, at many
institutions, academic life in this country was a grim affair:
warped by politics, distorted by hermetic "theorizing," disfigured
by unreadable prose and pretentious posturing. It was not a
world I aspired to join. I should also point out that, after the
publication of Tenured Radicals, it was not a world I would be
invited to join. That book, along with Allan Bloom's Closing of
the American Mind, became a book that academics loved to
hate. I was at first alarmed by the venom lavished on me and the
book but I soon learned to see the comic side of the spectacle.
In any event, it became crystal clear that an academic career was
out of the question--what university would have me?--and I let
the dissertation languish. I should say for the record, however,
that I regret not having finished the degree, since I believe one
should finish what one starts.
4. I like to refer to your work as being "hyper-intellectual fusion"
because your essays are multidisciplinary and cannot be confined
to one area of scholarship alone. Your pieces are the product of
a mind steeped in history, literature, art, politics and everything
else that can be consumed by the senses. How do you describe
yourself to people who ask? What's your first answer? Editor?
Writer? Critic? What is it that made you chose this unlikely
profession?
When people ask me what I do, I generally say "writer," but of
course that term covers a multitude of sins. In fact, I believe that
my work as a critic and my work as an editor are all of a piece. I
write for many magazines and newspapers, but The New
Criterion is my primary forum, and I like to think that the
distinctive blend of interests and perspectives that stamps The
New Criterion adds up to a coherent and valuable cultural
offering. T. S. Eliot (whose magazine The Criterion inspired the
name of The New Criterion) defined criticism as "the elucidation
of works of art and the correction of taste." We try to live up to
that definition. As for why I chose this odd combination of
activities--editor and critic--I can only say that it would be closer
to the truth to say that they chose me. I wrote. I edited. One day
I woke up and found I was a writer and an editor.
5. As a former student who was bewildered by the maze of
postmodernism, I must tell you how comforted I was to
encounter your work. You have the habit of seeing through the
veneer of the Tower of Babel from which many in our
universities speak by using common sense. With Foucault, in
your work Experiments Against Reality, you make the wonderful
connection that it is not surprising that a homosexual practitioner
of sadomasochism believes that every institution is really a scene
of unspeakable domination and subjugation. With Warhol you let
the man's words describe his essence "Art is what you can get
away with." How long did it take you to catch on to the
techniques of obfuscation in the Academy? Was there a period
where you doubted yourself and that maybe it was just you who
were confused by their logorrhea disguised as argument? An
example might be a professor's early morning journal entry
involving a sentence like this to describe a note to his secretary:
"deconstructive praxis of meta-cognitive outcomes based on the
discourse of Derrida."
There are many things about the academic life as I imagined it
that appeal to me: here was a life in which one could devote
oneself to reading great books, talking about them with intelligent
colleagues and eager students, and writing about them for
interested readers. I love academic libraries, those great
repositories of thought. But I soon learned that there was a great
distance between my picture of academic life and real academic
life. The warning bells went off quite early, in fact. I first
encountered Derrida in college. He was all the rage among some
of my teachers. I made a dutiful attempt to see what the fuss was
about. I concluded that he was a clever charlatan. The same
thing happened when I was prevailed upon to read Paul de Man.
It happened again with the work of Michel Foucault. I had an
ingrained allergy to the work of such people. It was partly a
revulsion to their style--hermetic, all-knowing, rebarbative--but
more basically it was a revulsion against the nihilistic assumptions
that provided the emotional fuel for their work and the logical
solecisms that put it over on protégés, whose cynicism about
traditional culture was matched only by their credulousness when
it came to the latest French import.
6. Art's Prospect is your 2002 release. I read it and also read
about it in The Weekly Standard. It is said to be an example of a
revolution in publishing today. The publisher is Cybereditions.
Could you explain what's unique about it's publishing process?
The publisher of Cybereditions suggested I collect some pieces
for an "e-book" with a paperback adjunct. Art's Prospect was
the result. It was a noble effort on the part of the publisher, but it
was not, I think, a publishing success. Perhaps this method of
publishing will eventually become popular, but at the moment it
lacks the support of the book publishing industry. Libraries do
not buy such books. Neither do book stores. They are not
reviewed. They exist in a shadowy world of indeterminate
publicness. Nevertheless, I am grateful to Cybereditions for their
efforts; the response to Art's Prospect, though small, was very
enthusiastic. So I am going to be publishing an expanded version
with Ivan R. Dee next fall. It will be available in hardcover and
will, I hope, attract its share of readers.
7. The thing that I love most about your work is that it teaches
but it also avidly takes up a position. There's no equivocating in
your pen. This sentence from Art's Prospect illuminates: ".for
those interested in the psychopathology of the culture, Gilbert
and George present a noteworthy specimen- an unusually
malignant boil or pustule on the countenance of contemporary
culture." [p.182] Is the fact that we're too diplomatic and polite a
hindrance to the conservative side in the debate on culture
today? Is it due to our fear that the media may label us mean
spirited?
The 19th-century English critic William Hazlitt described the
"common-place critic" as one who searched for truth "in the
middle, between the extremes of right and wrong." I believe that
one should be forthright in one's criticism. If something is
garbage, there is no reason to describe it as discarded domestic
foodstuffs in an odoriferous state of dissolution: it is garbage.
There is a place for dispassionate analysis, even-handed inquiry,
careful intellectual pluralism. There is also such a thing as the
perversion of those ideals--a perversion that is sometimes due to
cowardice, sometimes to a desire to obfuscate, sometimes to
both. The New York Times is a master of the genre. It prints a
highly tendentious piece about some controversial issue, but
pretends to maintain its even-handedness by a token quotation
from someone on the other side of the issue. Or consider the
recent BBC memorandum advising its correspondents that, in the
event of war with Iraq, scrupulous even-handedness would be
maintained. The Iraqi side was to be granted equal time and, lest
the BBC be accused of prejudicing its audience, British troops
were never to be described as "our" troops. Some might call that
even-handed; I think it borders on treason.
8. I read somewhere, sadly I don't recall where, that an
academic said "I am not the first person to have been persecuted
by Roger Kimball." How have your enemies responded to you?
How badly have they acted in retaliation for your words? Tell us
a story about their misbehavior, please (I'm sure it will interest
everyone).
Well, probably the most amusing episodes occurred at the
annual meetings of the Modern Language Association in the
years following the publication of Tenured Radicals. I went two
or three times and reported on the meetings--briefly in The Wall
Street Journal, at considerable length in The New Criterion. I
was generally not recognized, so I could sit inconspicuously in
the audience taking notes while listening to my work being
abused as (for example) "a leaden-footed, pig-headed attack."
Occasionally, however, I was recognized. At the MLA meeting
in San Diego in 1994, I was in the men's room when Homi
Bhabha (if you don't know who he is, don't ask: you have lived a
charmed life) and one of his acolytes sauntered in. They had
noticed the name tags my colleague Hilton Kramer and I were
wearing and were discussing the awfulness of our presence at the
convention. I forget the adjectives, but they were pungent. It
wasn't until I turned around and walked past them that they
noticed me and put the name tag to the face. They froze like post
colonialists caught in the headlights. It was a delicious moment.
9. The Long March was the first of your works I encountered. I
remain grateful to this day as it debunked many of the lies I was
brought up with and it explains so much of the current strife in
America. If you had to name one movement or belief that was
the most destructive offspring of the 1960's which one would it
be? How about which person or thinker was the most
destructive?
Gosh, this is a tough one. There are so many candidates to
choose from. One movement or belief? Perhaps the attitude--it
was a belief that became a movement--that traditional sources of
moral wisdom and social identity were the enemies rather than
the guarantors of happiness. The hedonist ideology that defined
the 1960s--an ideology that expressed itself in the rise of the
drug culture and the fall of conventional restraints on behavior--
worked its way into every facet of cultural life: it affected
families, churches, educational institutions; it changed the way we
thought about ourselves and each other. It was a change that
proscribed traditional virtues from patriotism to modesty, and
that encouraged instead a culture of narcissistic rebellion. In The
Long March I provide a sort of rogues' gallery of examples--of
individuals and movements--that it would be tedious to try to
encapsulate here. Still, I do not think I can do much better in a
brief compass than I did in the introduction. The Long March, I
wrote, "looks behind the received wisdom about 'the Sixties' to
the animating ideas, passions, and personalities that made that
long decade a synonym for excess and moral breakdown.
Above all, The Long March aims to show how the paroxysms of
the 1960s continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The
Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was
unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in
our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our
educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop
culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog." I hope that
at least is the start of an answer.
10. Okay, now a hard one. Rock n' roll. You believe all it
".offers is a prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy, blatantly sexual,
conspicuously nonrational." (The Long March, p.188) Are you
making a categorical rejection of rock music here? The Beatles?
Bob Dylan? Is there anything in this genre of music that you find
palatable? I write in the voice of a man who grew up on rock
and still loves it but I must point out that it does not preclude my
affection for other forms of music. Classical and jazz are a big
part of my life. Also, I believe that the highest emotions, such as
love, can be conveyed in this medium. Are there exceptions to
your rule?
Ah, rock 'n roll. My pages on rock in The Long March were
probably the most often criticized. Is their anything in rock I find
palatable? Sure. I grew up with rock music. But what is
palatable is not necessarily good for you. I think that Bob Dylan
is a clever songwriter--pretentious, vastly over-rated as a "poet,"
clever. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were very clever
songwriters. Not in the league of Cole Porter, and certainly not
in the league of Gilbert and Sullivan, but clever. There are many
other clever rock songwriters. But my objection to rock focuses
not on the tunes but on the basic intent of the music, which I
believe (as you quote) amounts to "prefabricated Dionysius
ecstasy." I believe, in other words, that Allan Bloom had it right
in The Closing of the American Mind when he argued that rock
is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. In some
ways this is a very old argument. In essence, it is a Platonic
argument. In The Republic, Plato argues that music is such a
powerful stimulant of the emotions that the state should be
cautious about what sorts of music it encourages. Some "modes"
of music, he thought, encouraged noble emotions, other forms
encourage base emotions. Aristotle did not put the matter quite
so starkly, but he, too, recognized that music was a powerful
educational force that could be used as well as misused. Rock
music is now ubiquitous, of course, and to some extent we all
tune it out. But its basic message--what makes rock rock--is not
the sweet strains of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" but the
amplified, percussive assault that addresses not the head or heart
but lower organs. Again, this is a complicated question that
deserves a complicated answer; the biggest question is whether
music can shape one's basic emotional responses. I would say,
yes, it can. Does it then follow that music can corrupt as well as
nurture the emotional life of individuals? Again, I would say yes.
(Hardly a new idea: consider, e.g., what Nietzsche has to say
about the baneful influence of Wagner.) If civilization is about
nuance, restraint, discrimination, and order, rock, I believe, is
anti-civilizational. Of course, every civilization requires some
home for the irrational, for the Dionysian. Does rock, perhaps,
offer an appropriate home for such impulses? I am skeptical. But
I can see that any attempt to answer that would lead on a
discussion that is much, much too long!
Mr. Kimball, thank you for your time and we'll look forward to
another twenty books in the years to come.
Bernard Chapin is a school psychologist and adjunct faculty
member in Chicago. He can be reached at emeritus@flash.net.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com